Meanwhile in Poland, the Catholic Church Works To Take Control Or Reproduction

Poland already had the strictest abortion laws in Europe, but now those might become even stricter:

But now a new bill, pushed by a pro-life foundation and the Ordo Iuris legal institute, would make abortion illegal in all circumstances. Doctors who performed an abortion could be punished with jail terms of up to five years. The only exception would be the “unintended” death of a fetus while saving a woman’s life.

I assume we should thank God for that exception, though in practice it might not necessarily save pregnant women's lives.

The linked Washington Post article argues that the Poles don't really mind such a draconian law, what with being devout Catholics and all (and possibly because illegal abortions and abortion-travel to neighboring countries are already "flourishing" alternatives).  I don't know if that assessment is correct, but it seems that a strong protest movement has finally been created:

Here’s what’s new: civil society’s unprecedented and immediate backlash. Within five days of the announcement, 85,000 people had signed up for the Facebook page of a protest group, Dziewuchy dziewuchom, which roughly translates as “Women for Women.” In an organized protest on April 4, hundreds of men and women walked out of Mass when priests read the Church’s official letter supporting an abortion ban.

But, argues Anna Grzymala-Busse, the writer of the WaPo article, this is not really about women's reproductive choice which most Poles don't support, but about the Catholic Church taking on the role of a political advocate and getting involved in partisan politics.  The Church would control reproduction better if it worked behind the stage, pulling strings here and there.  That way its religious authority would still be respected.

Okay, that last paragraph was my own mean-spirited interpretation.  But that doesn't mean it is necessarily a wrong interpretation.

To put all this into a wider framework, note the similar work done by right-wing religious groups in the United States.  Also note how Poland's Catholic Church, too, falls under the reign of the current Pope, much admired for his concern towards certain other ill-treated groups. 

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Added later:  The most extreme form of the anti-contraceptive, anti-abortion policy of the global Catholic Church amounts to a demand that women either stay celibate (including somehow avoiding getting raped) or accept a kind of Russian roulette for the sake of the Church's interests in maximizing the number of people in its pews, where the odds of surviving that roulette are continuously reduced by the Church.